Paper $16.00ISBN: 9780948462542
Published
April 2004
For sale in North and South America only

For a woman in the Western world, there is no escaping beauty. Either she possesses it, or she lacks it. If she lacks it, she may hope to gain it. If she already has it, she will certainly lose it. But what is "it"? Not an objective thing, Francette Pacteau tells us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of psychological experiences in the mind of the observer. What these experiences are, what causes them, and how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of this book.

Less interested in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy that frames it, Pacteau considers the staging of the aesthetic emotion. Her analysis extends from the Classical ideals of beauty, through Renaissance poetry to the recent formulations of Hollywood. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scène of beauty within a particular field of representations – that of the beauty of a woman.

AcknowledgementsIntroduction : more than a woman1. The portrait of Laura2. The imaginary companion3. Shattered beauty4. The girl of the Golden Mean5. Woman as hieroglyph6. Dark continent7. Skin deep8. Love at last sight9. Mirror, mirror...ImagesReferencesSelect Bibliography

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